Not so long ago, I wrote a post about my first impressions of Linux as a Windows user. A while after that, I booted back into Windows to get some files and oh god Windows is a terrible shock after you’ve gotten used to Linux. To be fair, my Windows installation at home has fallen prey to the 100% disk usage bug, which means that every reboot I have to patiently.. Read More

I’ve been thinking about interviews lately since I know a number of recent grads who are looking for work (ping me if you’re looking to hire a junior dev). Interviews can be really intimidating, especially when you’re trying to find your first development job. They still make me nervous and I’ve been at this programming thing for ten years. I’ve only participated in a couple of interviews from the employer side of.. Read More

Rubber duck debugging is one of those things that sounds completely ridiculous and is actually really helpful. To summarize the wikipedia page quickly, rubber duck debugging is when you figure out what’s wrong with your code by explaining it very carefully to an inanimate object. You’re probably wondering why you would bother explaining your code to an object like a rubber duck or a teddy bear if you work as.. Read More

The other day I learned that it’s possible to convert a field in a mongo collection to uppercase. I didn’t know that was a thing until I went digging, so in case it’s news to anyone else, here’s the stackoverflow link. While I’m at it, you can use regexs in mongo too, but of course they’re slow so don’t go nuts with them. Now we both know just enough mongo to.. Read More

There’s this stereotype that programming isn’t a creative field, that programmers do nothing but mechanically assemble code all day. I find that really sad, I think if we did a better job of explaining how creative programming actually is many more people would be willing to give it a shot. If you’ve only ever had a total beginner intro to programming, it might be really hard to see where the.. Read More

For Eclipse users new to Linux like me, it can be pretty frustrating when you try to install some updates and Eclipse just tells you “Insufficient access privileges to apply this update.” I don’t know about you, but I run Eclipse as admin on Windows, which should give you some idea what the problem is :) Yep, on Linux you just need to run “sudo eclipse” from the terminal. Thank you.. Read More